


Sail Up The Sun

by aetataureate



Series: Spider-Man is Dead (Long Live Spider-Man) [1]
Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Peter Parker loves being Spider-Man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 15:06:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17123654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aetataureate/pseuds/aetataureate
Summary: Peter knows he’s dying. He just doesn’t want to scare the kid.





	Sail Up The Sun

Peter knows he’s dying, is the thing. He can’t move his legs at all, and not in the normal “man, I’m so exhausted from all this city-saving I’ve been doing” way. There’s also a weakness in his chest he’s never felt before, and he’s felt pretty much all of the survivable kinds of weakness. It’s weird—a pressure, almost, but also sharp. He’s pretty sure one good hit would rupture his aorta, even from like, a regular guy. Kingpin is somewhere in the building.

Peter knows he’s dying. He just doesn’t want to scare the kid.

***

Peter Parker loved being Spider-Man. Not in the ugly, parasitic way that great athletes loved their sports, either, not in the way where it ate him alive. It was the uncomplicated kind of love that kids had for playing pick-up basketball in the summer, outside every day, the sun not all the way down until nine and even then trying to play under the streetlights until somebody’s mom came and scattered them away home. They revelled in the sweat and the motion, the cool tricks they could learn to do, the way the city moved around them. Peter had never been one of those kids, but he knew how they felt, being Spider-Man.

Every evening he put on his suit, it was _exciting_. He would look down at his own hands, the gloves Aunt May had stitched for him and think _Tonight, I get to be Spider-Man_. It was like getting to be Santa Claus and G.I. Joe and Mikhail Baryshnikov all at once. Sometimes when he needed a little bit of extra luck, like before a big exam or when he needed to sweet-talk his research advisor into an extension, he wore the Spider-Man suit all day, even though it required a dark shirt with a high collar and was therefore impractical. It made him happy, knowing it was under there.

Sometimes, just before dawn, Peter could hear the echo of the kid he must have been, once: _Mom, five more minutes_. He might have never gone home, he thought, if it wasn’t for the way MJ looked when he brought her coffee, a photo of the ugliest dog he had seen that night stuck under the cardboard sleeve.

***

The saddest fucking thing is that what they had was sustainable. He had worked really hard to make it that way, put his whole stupid heart into it. It had taken a lot of compromise, and Peter had been so proud of how adult they had been about it, twenty-three years old and sorting out whether married was something they should be to each other. Peter is a year behind his classmates in his grad program, two years behind where he should probably be. He doesn’t save the city on major holidays, birthdays other than his own, her opening nights, or their anniversary. On the nights when the world isn’t at stake, and it seems like looking over the edge of one more rooftop and seeing some deep welling pit of darkness might be the thing that breaks him, he goes home to MJ, who doesn’t mind being woken up and always knows what to say. They are waiting to get pregnant. They could have gone the distance, he’s sure of it.

That’s part of why he feels so bad, handing this kid the override key and a hastily-whispered set of tips that sound like Peter borrowed them from a man in a tin-foil hat. He’d been idly drafting a training plan in his head at the beginning of the fight, before it got bad. That’s never going to happen now, obviously. The kid might be fine anyway—Peter hopes he’ll be, Brooklyn is kind of counting on it, and besides, he seems like a nice kid. Peter had managed it, himself, but it would have been nice to have a helper. Peter would have liked to _be_ a helper. He likes helping. Also, he’s a big believer in responsibility, but now that he’s twenty-six, his perspective on what constitutes an appropriate amount of responsibility for a kid who must be what, like, fourteen? has evolved significantly.

Peter tries very hard not to think about how young twenty-six would have seemed one day.

***

Peter thought a lot about getting older. He was excited for it, for seeing what things changed, what stayed the same. He would finish his dissertation one day, and Professor Jerschow would finally crack a smile. He and MJ would move out of their apartment, maybe get a detached house with a little yard. He was looking at places in St. Alban’s. His body would change, which would be weird and fascinating, not that his body wasn’t already weird and fascinating. They were building a career management plan for that, and for when the kids came.

He already knew that he would be the crier, on first days of kindergarten, at graduations, dropping off boxes in dorm rooms. At weddings. He and MJ had lain in bed at night talking about it—he’d be the embarrassing parent. MJ wasn’t like that. She could keep up brave face for anything. She was going to be such a great mom.

***

They prepared for this, too. How could they not have? So it’s not that it’s particularly hard for Peter to let go, it’s just that letting go is hard in general. Peter has a whole litany of pointless wishes that somehow seem more accessible than _please, don’t kill me_. He wishes he could see Norman moving, for one. He’s known Norm for a long time, and it’s not that they get along—they don’t—but he’s fun to quip with and really cool-looking and doesn’t actually kill that many people. They’re at that awkward stage where Peter secretly kind of likes him, but also, he’s a weird person to die with. It’s not that Norman’s a colleague—Peter doesn’t have colleagues. If he had a colleague, it would be Aunt May, or maybe New York itself. There are always hot dog vendors or subway passengers or homeless dudes willing to trip up the bad guys a little, or yell “he went that way!” or at least pointedly ignore a particular alley. God, he loves New York.

He wishes he could see the city. For someone whose signature tactic involves swinging from great heights, he fights a lot of crime in sewers and underground bunkers and the like. Outside is all well and good for petty crime, he supposes, but organized crime is less of an open-air activity. He should have known better than to think he would be able to see the lights, when he died.

He wishes the kid hadn’t been filming. People do it all the time, and normally he doesn’t mind—Peter Parker would have to be quite the hypocrite to take issue with a guy with a camera. He had even thrown in a couple of unnecessary flips, because it was fun, and it looked cool. He would never tell the kid this, because it’s certainly not _his_ fault, but this was a pretty big fight—supercollider, multiple big bads—and “right in the middle of it” was probably not the number-one best time to meet a brand-new Spider-Man. It was a distraction, and Peter hadn’t been trying to make a snuff film. He hopes the kid put his phone away. Actually, he hopes the kid isn’t watching at all, that he’s long gone, or at least closing his eyes. Kingpin can be kind of—messy. When he’s angry.

He’s coming towards him now. Jaunty, Peter thinks, always jaunty—but it’s hard to come up with zingers when his mind is half on the kid and half on the pressure-pain in his chest. He ends up just telling Fisk the truth.

He’s wearing the Spider-Man suit, which unlike its occupant is mostly intact. Peter thanks the dual miracle that is materials science and Aunt May. It still makes him happy, and warm. He loves being Spider-Man. He loves being Spider-Man, and he doesn’t cry, like Mary Jane won’t.

He’s proud of that, when it comes.

**Author's Note:**

> I went to Spider-Verse in theaters twice and believe it or not the second viewing does not actually purge you of your feelings about Peter Parker. Don't try that technique. Write fic about him instead.
> 
> "Sail Up The Sun" is a song by Dylan Owen.


End file.
